Once again Christopher Brookmyre has produced an irritatingly good book.<\/p>\n
His characters are beautifully, yet succinctly, drawn.<\/p>\n
His scene-setting is pointedly brief.<\/p>\n
His dialogue is (for the most part) crisply authoritative.<\/p>\n
But none of these is the best part.<\/p>\n
The best part is Mr Brookmyre’s brilliant ability to coin a phrase that epitomises the zeitgeist.<\/p>\n
Irritating, as I’ve said.<\/p>\n
But also\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n
Excellent.<\/p>\n
I don’t believe Christopher Brookmyre is (yet) good enough to be considered a great author.<\/p>\n
In fact I think his work-to-date peaked with the brilliant ‘Fine Art of Stealing’.<\/p>\n
But what ‘All Fun and Games until Someone Loses an Eye’ does is showcases what a way above average writer can do.<\/p>\n
It highlights his ability to maintain suspense.<\/p>\n
And it benchmarks the standards of observational skills coupled with descriptive narrative that every author needs to meet.<\/p>\n
And that sets the bar very high for the rest of us.<\/p>\n
As with previous works, his cleverness in ‘All Fun and Games (etc)’ is erratic, but that doesn’t make it less clever.<\/p>\n
I love his wit, his technological grasp, his ability to suspend belief, his prose and the glimpses of a Scotland that you won’t get on a travel-ad!<\/p>\n
His understanding of human characteristics and motivations.<\/p>\n
But best of all I love his observations.<\/p>\n
And his descriptive narrative.<\/p>\n
And his ability to capture the zeitgeist.<\/p>\n
Yes I know that’s three<\/em> ‘best of alls’ but his skills in these areas really are that good.<\/p>\n Completely bloody irritating, as I’ve said.<\/p>\n But (also as I’ve said)… Excellent.<\/p>\n All Fun and Games until Someone Loses an Eye by Christopher Brookmyre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once again Christopher Brookmyre has produced an irritatingly good book. His characters are beautifully, yet succinctly, drawn. His scene-setting is pointedly brief. His dialogue is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}